Acrostic Poems

Most of the time, most of us, when writing fall into a pattern. We begin a lot of sentence with the words ‘I’ or ‘She’ or we find ourselves saying ‘all of a sudden’. This is a great little activity i use to break up the pattern in my writing and it’s nothing like the acrostic poems we used to do in school.

Simply type down the page, the very page of your novel that you’re working on now, a word. It could be your name, your main characters name or the first thing that pops into your head. Now every time you start a new sentence or paragraph you must begin it with the letter in the word that you’re up to.

Example: SNOW… there’s a vowel we don’t usually start a word with and a lot of consonants…

Somehow i wasn’t as convinced as my sister, i know i should have been able to trust her but trust came hard in my family. It was something that shattered constantly. The house echoed with the sound.

Never the less i followed her and i kept following her. ‘Just a little further’ she’d call out and we’d walk on for a few more hours.

Owls eyes glowed in the trees when we stopped. I wanted to scream at her, we should have been in bed, asleep and with full bellies. She’d kept such a cracking pace that i was simply too busy trying to catch my breath to say anything. yet.

‘Where!’ i began and cut myself off, it was amazing. A little grove, a pond and thousands of fireflies. i’d heard of them before but never seen them and this was something more than little glowing bugs. The light reflected off the waters surface, the tree’s hugged in close to the scene as if they too were watching. I closed my mouth, i didn’t need to say anything.

So you see it has nothing to do with the word you choose, unless you want it to, it’s all about challenging yourself with an unusual combination of sentence beginnings.